Hi
Just wondering if there is a link to this ??
Thnx
Sue
Anchāio non lo trovo
@sue1 @nickhislam Weāve just recorded the pre-test, which means that Tom will be starting streaming soon - Iāll share the link once itās up!
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Posted some more info in here:
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I wish I had seen this earlier and been able to join in. Any chance you will run it later in the year?
Theyāre going to be doing one intensive day per month for Italian. You can do it by yourself any time, too.
The idea is simply to use the app for a ridiculous number of hours. At the end of the official intensive day, there may be a Zoom chat to see how much you can actually use.
So if youāve done roughly 10 hours of Italian in the app by early February, you will hopefully be at the same level as Tom and Aran when they do the next one. And if youāve done more than that and are ahead of them, I suppose you could tune in just to watch them suffer? 
I think throat lozenges and/or drinks of hot lemon and honey may be needed if you do the full 10 hours.
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Does such intensive cramming work beyond a few days or weeks? Iām curious as to whether that approach actually embeds the language long-term
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Well, the theory is that it works just fine. The SSi team is pretty confident of this, and theyāre pretty much doing the intensive days as a proof of concept.
Stay tuned!
Do they have any follow-up interviews with past students etc to show the long-term retention?
Iāve used ssiw for Welsh and did learn phrases but just curious about the intensive days specifically
There may be interviews, Iām not certain. You can check the YouTube channel.
@stephen-14 I believe that participants of the S4C programme āIaith ar Daithā did the SSiW intensive days to get ready for it.
Theyāre all celebs so you might find something on the web about their experience or interviews - besides their āperformancesā in the programme itself, which, I seem to remember, was filmed soon after their course, so not really related about long-term retention - but still interesting I guess.
Even though I never did the intensive days, from my experience I could add:
in summer 2018 I did all Level 1 and Level 2 of the Welsh course in about a month and a half, starting from basically zero knowledge if the language, apart from having heard a few Datblygu songs (as many here know 
) and done a few lessons of Duolingo - never even heard it spoken once before.
I visited Wales six months later and did pretty well.
Then did all the course again one year later (faster - both levels one after the other in less than a month), and noticed I remembered a lot of it.
And even now, actually most of those sentences - or parts of them - are definitely, permanently stuck in my memory!
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Yes, Iāve watched a few Iaith ar Daith and enjoyed them, but again, I am still a little sceptical that intensive cramming of vocabulary has long-term benefit (I did a degree in modern languages and such techniques only ever got me through an exam, I know Iāve lost almost all the vocabulary I crammed in in those times!)
I should add that Iāve used SSiW in a less intensive way and found it certainly helpful and Iāve remembered many of the phrases, itās more the incredibly intensive approach Iām sceptical about.
Will be interesting to see if more comes out on the long-term retention from SSiW 
I have to say that one reason that might make SSiW more effective in an intensive type of learning - is that thereās not really a lot of vocabulary in it.
Itās more about āfiguring outā the basics of the structure of the Welsh language rather than trying to remember a lot of words in a very short time - which Iād find unlikely to stay in long term memory.
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Itās like anything else. If you donāt use knowledge or vocabulary fairly regularly, it fades. I even forget English words I havenāt used in years, and itās my first language. Thereās no magic trick to remembering a long list of āwhatever you are trying to rememberā in isolation. You just have to actively use what you have learnt. This is why spaced repetition is so valuable when it comes to remembering vocabulary or anything really.
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The original idea with the Japanese intensive was actually that we would do 10 days in January and then 2 days in December. There was some uncertainty about what would actually happen with some possible trip to Japan, or something like that. But none of us have spent any more time learning Japanese, so we might still stick to the plan. We wanted to see how much Japanese weād have left from our 10 days, then go on to do the final 2 days.
But, based on the Japanese 10-day intensive (whenever I happen to encounter some Japanese, or Iām asked to say a phrase) itās definitely still there 4+ months later and comes out surprisingly easily. I do think you need some āreactivationā (just some time saying stuff) to go back to exactly the same levelā¦ Itās definely a completely different feeling to cramming for 10 days before a language test (which Iāve done, many times, and immediately forgotten everything 
)
@aran will have a lot more to say about other experiments!
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Yes, it really, really does. I suspect strongly that itās because of the spaced repetition built into what would otherwise just be a process of cramming, as well as the high levels of ādesirable difficultyā in the process of speaking out loud - in my experience, the kind of ācrammingā that people do at degree level (or in school exams) is more about heavy repetition of vocab, without having spaced repetition built into it - and often focused on reading rather than speaking - which I suspect will always be less successful for longer term retention.
My first experience with this was using Manx material, years ago, and driven by the lack of material - I think we had 15 half hour sessions ready for my first intensive day, and then it took over a year - about 16 months, I think - before we had enough content for a second intensive day - and not only was I back up to speed in about the first hour, but some things which Iād never managed to say on the first day were easy by the second or third time I encountered them on the second day (like āI want to watch the football at the weekendā, which is a particular brute in Manx!).
And Iāve just had another personal example with Japanese - I wasnāt personally very happy at the end of Japanuary, even though we achieved a fair amount and the video footage has been enough to trigger interest from government and other possible partners - but I felt as though I was short of where Iād hoped to be in terms of confidence and flexibility.
We were at an event at the Japanese Embassy last week for the Wales/Japan 2025 project - so I spent about two and a half hours on the train on the way down going back through most of the content weād done in Japanuary - by the time I got to London, Iād probably reactivated about 80% of the content, but much more importantly I had a dramatically higher level of confidence in the core territory. So I hadnāt just retained (allowing for a reactivation period) but I had definitely also had some very valuable consolidation.
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